I/O operations from MS Word To MS Excel

I want to copy the text from MS Word To Ms Excel.what are the prerequirements i need to know .i was able copy contents from a notepad to msword.

it gave me a warning that "Word cannot start the converter mswrd32"
and when i clicked on "OK" Button.A Dialog Box has been opened where i have been asked to select encoding that makes document readable.After this process my text has been tranfered from notepad to ms word
so i want to know how file operations are done in this situation and also wat are the requirements to perform file operations on ms word documents .Do i need to know any Document Formats for this.